Wall Street Journal - The Year Video Games Became Art.2012 was an important year for video games. Prime examples of the form were curated for the first time by museums such as the Smithsonian, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Museum of Modern Art—with the MoMA even going so far as to add video games to its permanent collection. This is not to say that videogames were not art beforehand, or even to accept that “art” is the best term to use in describing video games. Video games are still, on some level, “ones and zeroes.” And they always will be. But it’s nonetheless culturally significant that a curator from an institution as hallowed as the MoMA finally said that they are also “ones and zeroes that get to form whole spatial structures and whole experiences.”

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dj LiTh wrote on Jan 3, 2013, 10:03:Like anything having to do with the word "art" ... eye of the beholder

I don't know about that.

With a video game, you have a program where often times thousands of hours are spent designing, drawing, coloring, shading, and putting together a specific look and perspective for each scene the viewer sees. The only part which seems to get people stuck on the difference between what you see in a video game and what you see in an animated movie is that you can interact with and play the game, somehow making it not art to certain people. It makes no sense.

Then again, a lot of those people will think a shit log on a table is a profound statement of post-modernism, too, so it's probably an argument doomed to exist forever.